1. Field of the Invention
The present disclosure relates to a biometric authentication. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a biometric authentication for implementing both security and convenience of the biometric authentication.
2. Description of the Related Art
As well known, exemplary features used in current biometric systems include features of a face, a voice, a hand shape, an iris and a fingerprint, each of which has been positively studied.
Recently, a portable electronic device, e.g., a smartphone also employs biometrics, and the most common biometric technology among various biometric technologies is a fingerprint recognition. The fingerprint recognition has advantages of higher security and usability over other biometric recognition technologies.
However, most fingerprint recognition sensors equipped in the portable electronic device such as the smartphone are very small to meet cost and spatial requirements and thus receive very small part of the fingerprint. Using the small part of the fingerprint contributes to lowering a security level because of lack of fingerprint feature information.
The security level is generally determined by means of a false acceptance rate. In a case where the fingerprint recognition is performed with respect to a whole fingerprint, the false acceptance rate is about 1/one hundred million. However, in a case where the fingerprint recognition is performed with respect to part of a fingerprint as in the portable electronic device, lowering the false acceptance rate to below 1/one hundred thousand is difficult. Therefore, it is very risky to use such fingerprint recognition employed in the portable electronic device for a payment or a finance-related service for which high security is essential.
Conventionally, the portable electronic device uses a password authentication method additionally to enhance security of the biometric recognition, e.g., the fingerprint recognition. However, it creates a burden on the user of having to remember the password, and having to enter the password for the biometric authentication (see, e.g., Korean Patent Application Publication No. 2012-0122587).